The Isle of Marm
One of many awkward me-affiliated places.
Time-Dependent SemiPublic Memory Bank,
Super Secret Dumping/Proving Ground,
Displaced Miscellany Collection,
3 Hours in the Future (EST)
One of many awkward me-affiliated places.
Time-Dependent SemiPublic Memory Bank,
Super Secret Dumping/Proving Ground,
Displaced Miscellany Collection,
3 Hours in the Future (EST)
While clearly not as jaunty as vice-grips, an adjustable wrench is an important and useful tool for many situations. Even just to talk to, sometimes.
BUT did you know slightly racist names for these guys exist everywhere? Obviously they would: people are salty without borders.
I was helping someone out with car problems (because, if I don’t reaffirm my status as “triple-A with double-D’s” occasionally, I may lose my fake certification) and asked for the “Mexican Socket Set” (which I can semi-legitimately say), and was told that in Germany they are called “Englishmen”.
THE MORE YOU KNOW.™
(These two are actually named “The Lobster” and “The Challenger”. If nothing else, we will consider this.)
I know, right?!
So jaunty!
Useful Duck knows the difference between channel locks and vice grips.
Useless Duck is offended when you ask for dikes.
I’ve made a lot of shameful things, but some of them I don’t hate at all.
Not at all.
Vice grips always look so jaunty, they’re some of my favorite tools.
There is no pressing need to know that. There’s no pressing need for anyone to know anything like that. But there it is. Out there. This is me; this is my stake in the ground: sometimes I just like things that look like things. Especially anthropomorphically happy things. If nothing else today works out, there’s still that.
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
Chuck Close. He’s like the art sphere’s Steven Hawking, right?
Oh, they’re totally different, I know. Every field of study is a beautiful and unique flower. Stepping on toes! I’m running on caffeine and bravado. Baltimore! I spent Tuesday/Wednesday with My Omar and now I’m doing Wire reenactments on my own. If you want the joy of guiding an idiot through the city, ping me in the next 3 hours!
A couple weeks ago, when I went to that gallery thing in an effort to make some headway into Operation: Let’s Meet People, I saw a piece of this quote on a wall and left myself a note to track it down in full-er. The sentiment reminded me of what was a weird fear I had back in 2009 — whether I would still make interesting things during the night if it weren’t a venting activity from the pressure built from the stresses of science-doing during the day and vice versa. Because all my vices feed each other. Like an ouroborus of terrifying awesomeness. (The jury on that issue remains out.) And now I have tracked it down. Next action.
Noticed this morning while dealing with weather: What’s up with the fact that back windshields have the resistively heated lines, while I have to scrape away at the front windshield like a chump? Is it a distraction of lines issue? Or a strength thing? Glass pane removal and replacement was part of the glass work that I had to learn after an unfortunate incident involving liquid nitrogen, some fruit, and an unlucky window; and, consequently, wanted to learn more about (which led to my taking a welding class in college since glass blowing wasn’t an option). And the rest is history.
A morning of reading up on automotive technology/rear-window defrost leads me to believe it is the distraction thing moreso than the strength thing, but I don’t know for certain. I bet the popemobile has resistively heated glass. Thank god I get paid to sit here and think or someone might call this wasted time. (Resistively heated glass project, you have won my time this morning.)
One of the more memorable weekends in the last decade involved taking a bat to a windshield. I wasn’t sorry at all.* Fancy newer auto-glass sticks together due to the glass being the meat in a delicious** polymer sandwich. Sweet and safeish.
*Me and a friend were preparing a car for a demolition derby, and there is no glass in derby cars. Our first car, a Safari, was the one I was unapologetic about. The Saab actually got to me a little. I loved that car. I love the driver. I fall in love a little even now, every time I see a mid 80’s Saab900 on the road. It wasn’t running particularly well anymore, which was why it became derby fodder, but, …I had a picture of its engine above my instrument back in the lab for a couple years. Covered in little hearts. Because I’m a girl. Anyhow, I think I’ve now set myself up for a date with the all Gary Numan playlist. At least until the next meeting. To the space pyramid!
**Probably not a gustatory tastiness so much as mentally delectable.
When it seems I’ve gone from A to B to C to Z, it is often more likely the case that I actually quietly detoured at some other letters.
This was my favorite little guy from a one-and-done kind of page. So…lazy.
Useful Duck knows the difference between channel locks & vice grips.
Useless Duck is offended when you ask for dikes.
That was also a fun summer project.
Johnny 5 consults a Haynes Manual.
I don’t have one on me—it was never mine—so I can’t say for certain that they don’t still remember; but, there was a glorious period in the first half of the last decade when my fingers knew the Haynes manual for the ‘86 Saab 900 as well as they knew Stryer’s Biochemistry (Edition 4), the piano I used to break into Bailey Hall to play under cover of darkness, or myself. Within a couple weekends, I fixed the Swedish Princess’s transmission*, cut off her catalytic converter, re-routed the gas, installed safety bars, welded her shut, and then** let someone I dearly loved go drive her into other cars while his parents watched. That was our 2nd derby car (the year after 1st hanging out w/ Florin***), so there were indicators that I was competent enough, but—though I kept quiet about it—I was terrified.
This was years before anyone’d call me “triple A with double D’s”.****
I’m not a car person, but my vehicle is also named Johnny 5.
*The stick-shift ended up replaced with welded-on vice-grips, but it could still shift gears. The driver lived: I still count it as a success.
**The work weekends were the best. I’m sure a lot of it was the people and location, but bug-testing where the operations of a car is concerned? Diagnostically-delicious intellectual relief. I had mixed feelings about the actual derby part, but making a non-operational vehicle into an operational one was super satisfying. MDs generally don’t like it when one makes the comparison, but as professions, mechanics and medical doctors have that in common. One seldom has a positive “case solved, we’re done” moment in most science research. Not never, but…not usually. Anyway, I love my work, but sometimes it is nice to take a break.
***It’s that time of year, I think remembering F.R. died the other day is probably what put me back into the mindset that noticed the manual in the Hulu frame-grab above.
****Spectacular quote of questionable truthiness. They’re not that big. I feel like that was the night we gelled as a household, though somewhere in North Oakland. Changing tires, changing lives!
